Christopher Muller

Im, am, um und vor dem Bild

12.06. - 24.07.11

The Forum für Fotografie presents a selection of Christopher Muller’s most recent photographic work from three thematic groups: still lifes, landscapes, and collages.

The central aspect of Muller’s artistic approach is the combination and confrontation of familiar daily objects with situational fragments. Behind the function-oriented banality of the individual elements pushed into the picture, a new unfamiliar view open onto a surreal-seeming second nature comes into being, a kind of strange, independent life of objects.

The unspectacular objects, displaced from their banality in subtly ironic arrangements, acquire an almost human individuality and intimacy.

Thereby they seem, on the one hand, to come closer; yet, on the other hand, they take on a new distance from the viewer. Through this strategy of alienation of the obviousness, the all too familiar reality has the opportunity to make an appearance in a surprising way. The artist verbalizes his way of looking at things as follows: " The objects have familiar functions and represent common patterns of behavior and we don't pay them any special attention in everyday life. I am fascinated by the way these simple, mundane objects sometimes overtly break their silence and evoke or reflect a certain mood."

The deliberate play with the competing gestures of scrupulous staging and apparent casualness of reality leads to a constantly reformulated interrogation of the viewed material world and a reflection on the constructedness of the photographic image itself.

Whether through combinatorics or through digital manipulation, the illusion of the documentary is put into question by moments of disruption, and conducted ad absurdum. What remains is the possibility of receiving on an unexpected terrain a new, not absolutely certain view of the ambiguity of the real and the complex subtlety of Muller's photography.